James Harden's New Signature Shoe Has MVP Swag

Forget all the data Adidas gathers about James Harden’s on-court movement. Forget all the talk of new and improved upper materials. Forget the pillowy comfort provided by the brand’s Boost material. When the design team at Adidas met with Harden, along with his friends and confidantes, halfway through last year’s NBA season to give the not-yet MVP a first look at his new signature shoe, the Harden Vol. 3, there was only one question Harden asked, according to Adidas Basketball’s senior director of footwear Rashad Williams. Does it have swag, bro?

It might sound silly, but in 2018, that question is monumentally important. The Harden Vol. 3 is nominally a basketball sneaker—but sneakers today cover much more ground than the basketball court. They pop up on runways and fuel sales for department stores and luxury designers. “Culturally, things are a lot different from how our parents went from work, where sneakers are acceptable now,” says Williams.

Adidas understands this as well as any brand—it collaborates with artists like Kanye and Pharrell as well as designers like Rick Owens and Raf Simons. There’s no longer a division between fashion and sneakers in the mind of consumers or designers, so why shouldn’t those worlds collide on an Adidas basketball shoe too? That’s why, before Harden put on the shoe and ran around in it, he needed to know if it had swag, bro. The first model, for the record, got an enthusiastic yes—the room filled with excited suggestions of future colorways and visions of different player exclusive models.

So what does it take to pass Harden’s swag test? “He loves high fashion. He loves really bold [color] blocking and graphics,” Williams says. During the design process, the pair would text back and forth, or Harden would pull up references he wanted to see in future shoes. One day, Harden loaded Instagram and showed Williams a bunch of Versace T-shirts he was feeling. Williams promises we’ll see the Versace-inspired shoe later on down the road.

But the point of the Harden Vol. 3 is that whatever the Beard is into—whether that’s those tees or a special-edition shoe for Houston—this shoe was constructed to soak all that up. "We do look to see how we can dimensionalize the shoe and it can transition to be able to give different looks to consumers," Williams says. The lace band running across the upper is meant to keep Harden secure, but it’s also a canvas for interesting design or loud colors. Same goes for the toe reinforcement. The current black and grey colorways are inspired by space because Harden plays for the Rockets in the same city NASA is headquartered—but also because he creates space on the floor. So the upper sparkles like a night sky and the band is dotted with plus signs meant to represent stars.

The shoe’s versatility is key heading into a season in which players and sneaker brands will be afforded more creativity than ever. The NBA recently announced that it would no longer ban players from wearing only team-color sneakers. The development will lead to all sorts of wacky on-court colorways. (Like, say, one inspired by the colors and graphics of Versace.) The rule change created a stir at Adidas. “We've been working fast and furious to get something together,” Williams says. “I've been pushing the team to get something out there we think he's going to love.”

The explosion of color isn’t the only sneaker-focused storyline we’ll follow when the NBA season kicks back off in the middle of next month. There’s also an influx of new brands looking to storm the court. Puma relaunched its basketball program with a bunch of high first-round picks from this year’s draft, like DeAndre Ayton, Marvin Bagley III, and Zhaire Smith. New Balance is also reportedly getting into basketball with its sights set on Gordon Hayward as an ambassador. “When you look at that, your competitive juices start to flow a little bit more and then you really start to really think about how you can set yourself apart from competitors,” Williams says.

What Williams hopes will set Adidas aparts is exactly what Harden does. ”He epitomizes who we are,” Williams says. One of the reasons, Adidas shelled out $200 million for Harden, outside his MVP-quality play, is that he’s stylish—equally fearless in the face of defenders and Comme des Garçons sequined basketball shorts. So any Three Stripes shoe needs to perform. But the Harden Vol. 3 has to have swag, bro.

The Harden Vol. 3 Voyager colorway ($140) releases October 12th and the black-and-white Cosmos ($160) follows on October 15. Both at adidas.com.